One of the most remarkable success stories of recent times is the rapid growth and widespread acceptance of the Internet-based World Wide Web. Pages of the web contain a wealth of information on a great many topics of both casual and professional interest.
Simply by entering keywords into a web browser that works in concert with an Internet search engine, an Internet searcher can search the web, and thereby locate relevant web pages. However, a search may well find far more information than the searcher can consider, due to the abundance of information that is now accessible through the web. For example, an Internet search defined by a few keywords might uncover hundreds of related web sites.
In order to make the results of a search tractable, the browser's presentation of the search results is limited to a relatively small number of web pages, even though the search engine may have found a larger number of relevant web pages. Further, the pages that are presented are often ranked according to their relevancy to the search using rules that are known by the search engine but often unknown by the searcher. For example, although the search engine might find 895 web pages that satisfy the search criteria, the browser might rank and present only 200 of these pages to the searcher. Because of these limitations, the searcher is unable to gain the full benefit of the wealth of information that is potentially available through the Internet.
As an aid to searchers, web pages themselves often include links to other web pages that are somehow related. For example, a search for information on the agricultural products of the fictional state of Heartland might locate a web page sponsored by the Heartland Department of Agriculture. The web page of the Heartland Department of Agriculture—the first web page—might itself provide links to other web pages potentially of interest. One of the links from the first web page might be to a second web page, that of the California Institute for Citrus Research, while another of the links from the first web page might be to a third web page that provides a biography of the Heartland Commissioner of Agriculture. Clearly, the second web page might be of interest to the searcher, whereas the third web page might not.
Unfortunately, the relevancies of the links that appear on the first web page are not necessarily so clear as in the example above regarding Heartland. In practice, a searcher has no way to determine with any degree of confidence which web-page-to-web-page links to pursue and which not, as the transition from one web page to another takes the searcher away from the rankings of suitability provided by the search engine, however useful these rankings might or might not turn out to be.
Sometimes a search is not conducted systematically, meaning that the search does not begin with a search engine's enquiry. Rather, the search may begin by accessing a web page known to the searcher or discovered accidentally, and proceed by following links from that page. This unsystematic searcher faces the same problem as the systematic searcher who begins with a search engine—the searcher has no way to determine with any degree of confidence which web-page-to-web-page links to pursue and which not—but the unsystematic searcher lacks even the initial rankings of suitability provided by the search engine.
Thus there is a need for a way of providing an indication of relevance of links that take an Internet searcher from one web page to another, whether a search begins systematically or not, so that the searcher may efficiently explore the wealth of information that is available—in principle—through the Internet, but which often goes unfound in practice, without being led astray by links to pages lacking relevancy.